For she was not modern, and mechanical, and full of the “Daily This” or the “Daily That.” She was woman. She had existed before such noisy ingenuities and she would outlast them. She was like a deep wood with its silence and its shadows, or a green valley between high hills. She lived in London, but she was not of it; she might do her shopping in the Essex Road, but she did not belong to Essex Road. She belonged to herself, the rarest form of property in these days when the social theorists would insist upon every individual adhering to a glutinous mass of state porridge.
At Highbury Terrace they called her “Mrs. Silence”. She was particularly cherished there. They had tried to persuade her to become a permanency, but she was a creature who liked to be apart. She glided about her work, and when the work was done she walked home like a woman returning through wide fields.
Sometimes she would be persuaded to wait at table when Highbury Terrace was giving a dinner-party. She waited very well, but with an air of aloof dignity. People noticed her.
“My dear, who is the treasure? Where did you get her?”
“O, Mrs. Silence.”
“What a quaint name.”
“It’s our name for her. She just comes in.”
Men noticed her. She was made to be noticed, but not to be smiled at glibly or spoken to as a man speaks to a waitress. She was deep water, too deep for facetious splashings. Yet her calmness was without austerity.
Her mind dealt much with simple things, for to her the simple things mattered. In retrospect she rescued Scarsdale’s self-made bed, and smiled over it, but inwardly so. Obviously he had been puzzled as to how to finish off the bottom sheet and the bolster, but his hands were like that, gentle and ineffectual and hesitant.
She wondered about him. What did he do with himself all day while she was away at work? He had told her that he wrote for the papers, that is to say he was a journalist or what she called a newspaper reporter, and she had always supposed that newspaper reporters were active, pushing little men who hurried about with notebooks hunting news, and especially sensational news. There was no sensational note in Scarsdale, nor could she see him hurrying, or pushing himself forward in front of his fellows. Also, he appeared to have no friends.
He had asked her to buy for him a table, a very small table.
“You see,—I have to write.”
She had suggested that he should use the sitting-room. There was really no reason why he should not use the front sitting-room.
“You can leave your papers there.”
“But the terms don’t include the use—”
She had understood his difficulty. He was both hard up and sensitive.
“Well, never mind.”
“Oh, but I can’t accept—”
“Just as you pleasure. If you care to pay me another half-crown a week.”
“That seems very little.”
“You just sit there and write.”
A cold spell arrived after he had been with her a week, and he sat without a fire, wearing his overcoat. He did not want to afford a fire, or to give her the trouble of dealing with it, but he spoke to her about an oil stove, and as though he were asking a favour.
“Would you mind if I bought an oil-stove? I could fill it myself, couldn’t I? And I could use it and turn it out.”
“Obviously.”
“Why not?”
“It would save the trouble of a fire, and one’s fingers get cold. But of course you understand that I pay for the paraffin.”
“It won’t cost very much, especially if you only use it when you work.”
He reiterated the remark, “But of course I pay for the paraffin.”
She bought him a stove, and two gallons of spirit, and he seemed surprised that she had managed to buy the stove so cheaply. He handed over the money. He looked bothered about something.
“Where can I keep the can?”
“I’ll keep it for you.”
“But I shall have to bother you.”
“It won’t take me two minutes to fill the stove.”
“It’s very good of you.”
After all he did clean his own shoes. He had bought a couple of brushes and a tin of polish, and he made quite a good job of cleaning his shoes.
3
Scarsdale cleared away his breakfast. He carried the tray into Mrs. Richmond’s kitchen-sitting-room, and placed it on the table, and returned at once to his own quarters. He did not linger in that mysterious room in which Mrs. Richmond moved and breathed and had her being. It was as though he felt himself to be a trespasser.
He lit his stove, placed it near the chair, and sat down to write. He was finding it difficult to write. The seriousness of his situation seemed to trend upon the tail of his inspiration, such as it was, and his inspiration, though trying to flee forward, would remain like an animal held in a trap. There were mornings when he felt paralysed. He would sit and stare at the red façade and the rows of windows of the model dwellings over the way. He would sit and listen to people passing in the Row. Nothing inward would come to him. His consciousness was externalized.
There were mornings when he felt restless, hunted. He would hold his chilly hands over the stove and say to himself—“I must do something. This sort of thing can’t go on.” And he would get up and go and look out of the window, and then return to his chair, and try to think of something original and arrestive to put down on paper.
At times his restlessness had other origins. His consciousness would concern itself with Mrs. Richmond. It seemed to gather like the dusk round a lamp, and the lamp was her face. This little house was so full of her; it seemed to listen and watch and breathe.
There was that morning when a more urgent restlessness made him get out of his chair and go gliding guiltily about the house. It was as though he was in search of something, he knew not what. He found himself in the back room, and looking at all the objects in it with a poignant curiosity, inanimate things yet somehow alive. He discovered the cat on the hearthrug, and he was startled; almost he apologized to the cat.
“Poor puss. Just looking round.”
Thomas the cat was not in the least disturbed. He continued his meditations. He allowed Scarsdale to rub a finger against his neck. Obviously, the man creature meant no harm.
Scarsdale looked about him, and his glances were quick and self-conscious. So that was her chair, and that was her sewing-machine. He observed some photos on the mantelpiece, but there was no portrait of her, and his inspection was casual. He saw a small hanging bookcase and went toward it. Girl’s books, a strange medley, Pear’s Annual, a guide to Winchester, a Bible. He took down the Bible and looked at the fly-leaf.
“Eleanor Mayhill”, and underneath it was written “Eleanor Richmond”.
So that was her Christian name. Eleanor, Ellen, Nellie, Nella. The Eleanor expressed her to him at the moment. And Mayhill. What a green and fragrant name.
He put the book back. He retreated with a sense of haste, half closing the door, and catching the cat’s yellow eyes fixed on him. Well, cats could not tell tales.
But he felt restless. He put on his hat and coat, and was about to close the front door when he remembered that he had left the oil-stove burning. He returned and extinguished it. He turned left along Astey’s Row, and reaching the steps at the end of it, dropped into the Essex Road. He walked toward Islington Green and Upper Street. He had ceased to stroll in the direction of Highbury, for he was strangely afraid of meeting Miss Gall.
He took a bus at the “Angel”. He sat and stared. He was saying to himself, “I must—do—something. Positively—I must do something. When the money runs out—” The bus was cold, and he shivered slightly, and caught the eyes of a woman looking at him curiously. Why had she stared at him like that. He did not realize that he was looking frightened.
He left the bus at the Gray’s Inn Road. He found himself in Holborn. He arrived at Newgate. Then Ludgate Hill, the Circus, Fleet Street. He had decided to go and see Taggart. He was
feeling desperate. His long legs carried him into the narrow street and to the door of the familiar building. He found himself addressing the same, snub-nosed, cheeky boy.
“Mr. Taggart in?”
“Ain’t been in for a month.”
“O, how’s that?”
“ ’Ad pneumonia.”
Scarsdale turned away.
4
He felt frightened. Never before had he experienced this sort of fear. He walked fast as though something pursued him, and yet his walking was aimless. Both the pavements and the roadway appeared more crowded; there was more noise, more hurry. Buses and vans loomed over you like walls on wheels. All these people! How did they live? It was amazing to him that they managed to live. And what was the meaning of it all, this vast scuffle, this rushing hither and thither, this catastrophic noise? He was struck by the absurdity of modern life, but his sense of the absurd brought a laugh that was like a grin on the face of a man who had died violently and terribly.
He came upon a crowd of men and youths half blocking the pavement outside the window of a newspaper office. They were looking at the photographs of two boxers. Football and fighting. He circumvented this human obstruction, and found himself on the heels of a filthy old man in an overcoat that had once been black; a mass of grey hair straggled; the deplorable boots shuffled; this human thing smelt. It travelled steadily along the centre of the pavement, and life diverged and avoided it. Scarsdale hurried past with a glance at the filthy, cynical, hairy old face. He turned up Chancery Lane. He found himself in Holborn, and here was the eternal crowd, faces hurrying past, strange faces had no light in their eyes.
The crowd frightened him. These thousands upon thousands of people! This desperate hanging on to the edge of existence! What chance had he? Life was like a stampede, a panic rush of animals in a narrow place. Even the traffic strengthened the simile, and he felt a sudden urge to escape from it, to break away and scramble up into some cleft where he would not be trampled upon and crushed.
He thought of Mrs. Richmond, and the quiet little house, and the consoling and reassuring inevitableness of her coming in and going out. His panic mood made her seem more real and more vivid. Fear! It seemed to him that—somehow—she was a creature above fear. She rose and set like the sun. But what was her secret, if she had a secret? Meanwhile, his confused and frightened consciousness seemed to strain towards this cleft in a world of trampling and confusion. He dissolved into naked innocence. His child’s cry was, “I want to go home.”
5
He realized the emptiness of the house when he had withdrawn his key and closed the door, but its emptiness did not trouble him. He took off his hat and coat, and went up to his bedroom, and the unmade bed reproached him. How futile of him to leave the making of it to her! He dealt with the bed, as though engaged in creating a work of art, and after much pattings and pullings the thing was done somewhat to his satisfaction. He descended the stairs. He knew that necessity urged him to go and sit at the table in the front sitting-room and attempt to produce something that might pique an editor, written words that would produce a guinea, but the will to produce was not in him. He glanced at the half-closed door of Mrs. Richmond’s room, and somehow it had for him the spell of a sanctuary. He trod softly down the passage, and entered the room. The cat was asleep on the hearthrug. It opened sleepy eyes at him. He turned her chair to face the grate in which fresh wood and coal waited for the match. He sat down in her chair; he picked up the cat and made a lap for Thomas, and stroked the warm fur. Thomas accepted the intimacy. He purred.
Scarsdale sat there for two hours. He felt guilty, yet strangely comforted. He kept looking at his watch, and half an hour before he expected Mrs. Richmond to return, he replaced Thomas on the hearthrug, betook himself to the front room, lit the stove and sat down at the table. She should find him there in the act of writing, even though nothing of value had dropped from his pen.
Chapter Twenty-three
Spring came, and with it a greenness on the privet bushes. The sticky brown buds of the chestnuts opened, and lilacs showed a tinge of gold. Looking up and through the branches of the great plane-tree, Scarsdale could see the pale and exquisite veil of the young year covering the face of April. Beyond the Canonbury Road the placid surface of the New River reflected white clouds and patches of blue sky; its water seemed to brim and swell against cushions of vivid grass! It looked more deep. The sombre tangle of the old May trees became a glimmering greenness. Somewhere a blackbird would be singing. Strange, sweet sound! Old Canonbury Tower, sunning itself on the high ground, dreamed of the days when the hills were all white thorn, and oak woods blazed bronze and gold, and the sound of a horn was heard.
Scarsdale’s balance at the bank had fallen to some forty pounds. He had earned nothing since coming to Astey’s Row. He had cast upon the waters of chance three or four articles and two short stories and he had heard no more of them. He had no work, and no prospect of obtaining any, for he had ceased from his mild importuning of editors and directors.
His fear of Fleet Street had become an obsession. It was as though a door had been closed on him so often that he had lost the little courage necessary to dare the reopening of that door. He was afraid of finality. He flinched from the probable rebuff; in fact, he expected it, and to save both his face and his feelings he kept away and out of reach. A kind of numbness seemed to settle on him, idleness, apathy. It was not that he refused to think; he thought with clarity and conciseness of the future, and was frightened while feeling that he was unable to escape. He was like the rabbit on Martinsell Hill. The simile suggested to him that the more you struggled the more quickly you would be throttled. He did not struggle.
Also, he had developed a fear of crowds, and places where crowds gathered, and this particular phobia had grave implications. He was becoming both shabby and eccentric. He avoided humanity. He found himself sidling with a sense of surreptitious timidity, into quiet streets, and in the avoiding of the more noisy and multitudinous highways his walks became absurdly circuitous. He did not try to explain or to justify his timidity. Probably it was but one of those strange terrors which man—the child—is heir to. As a small boy he could remember being terrified by turnstiles, and terribly afraid of a certain passage between two high, dark garden walls. It was both before and beyond reason. His fear of crowds and of streets thunderous with traffic suggested that he was afraid of being crushed. He shrank from a something that was darkly inevitable, submergence, stifling, muddy water, darkness, death.
In likening himself to the rabbit of Martinsell Hill he might have compared Mrs. Richmond’s house to a rabbit-hole. It was his burrow. He felt most strangely secure in it, and after he had emerged from it and won by devious ways to Highbury Fields, and seen the green of the grass and of the trees, he would return like an animal disappearing into a hole. He was developing little oddities, tricks of behaviour. Before taking cover he would pause at Mrs. Richmond’s gate, and glance anxiously up and down Astey’s Row almost as though he expected the head of a pursuing crowd to appear.
Once within he felt safe from the crowd, from the savage surge of the struggle, from those hungry faces, from the noise. He felt so lonely in a crowd. A crowd was like blown sand, hard little particles blindly rubbing against each other. No other particle cared what happened to you. The faces looked hard and unfriendly and strange. And in the crowded streets he seemed to hear a grim underchant, the growl of the beast that was hungry and out in search of food. “Get out of my way. Get out of my way.” Even the buses uttered that same threatening snarl. “Get out of the way, curse you.”
He sat on the same seat in Highbury Fields with his back to the houses of Highbury Terrace. He did not know that Mrs. Richmond worked at Highbury Terrace. The woman of silence had not told him so. Nor did he know that his seat was almost opposite the house in which she worked, and that she had only to look out of a window to discover him.
She had discovered him. From an upper window she could
see the seat between a holly and a lilac and under the green fringe of a poplar. He sat sideways on the seat, with one arm crooked over the back of it, and in his lap a little paper bag. He had the seat to himself, for when the sparrows came to share his luncheon hour, nursemaids and children and casual folk disappeared. His isolation and his little bag of buns moved her to sympathy, for she too was separative, a hater of crowds and of the crowd’s stupidity. It was her nature to resent interference. She liked to stand apart, wisely and silently, and to be the mistress of her own front door. Not that her sympathy did not go out to the individuals in the mass.
But she was independent, proud. She preferred to stand alone. She had not adopted the modern attitude, the habit of standing at the corners of life’s street waiting for some state-almoner to arrive with the circus or the food ticket. Had she had children she would not have expected them to be clothed and fed and educated by people whose houses were larger than her own. She had none of the arrogance of ignorance, its envious snarl. She went about her work with a dark-eyed, silent aloofness.
She watched Scarsdale scattering crumbs for the sparrows. His hands might be ineffectual, but they were gentle hands. They did not clutch. His was a very lonely figure, and she wondered whether his own loneliness sat with him on that seat. He seemed so much older than he should be, so finished.
For, early in the morning, she had looked at the sheets of paper on his table. They were laid out neatly. His handwriting was regular and delicate; the lines were nicely spaced, and the margin uniform. While, up above she had heard him moving in his bedroom.
But she suspected that often he must sit in his chair as he sat on that seat, killing time and throwing crumbs to sparrows. For three successive mornings she had read the same lines on the page of manuscript paper. He had not added anything to them. They seemed to project into the white space like some unfinished fence jutting into a green field. It was as though he could not carry the work any farther.
Old Wine and New Page 24